Archive for category “Good Plastic Surgery in the OC”

Good Tummy Tuck Results Orange County California

Years ago I did some work for a great looking 40 year old mom who worked out incessantly and had a great athletic body. Despite the working out though, her tummy had some changes from her pregnancy years before and her breasts were a bit small and droopy for her tastes. After a few years and two operations (Breast lift/implants and a tummy tuck,) she sent me this bikini image with a thank-you note.

Plastic surgery can work out well when done properly in the right patient. These are good tummy tuck results, but in reality all plastic surgery results vary. Only few patients get this kind of “knock it out of the park” result. They tend to be the people who are already in great shape. There is no overemphasizing doing your part.

Weight loss tummy tuck surgery is tummy tuck surgery after significant weight loss. Here we have Before & After images of the oldest patient for whom I have ever performed abdominoplasty. She was 73 at the time of her tummy tuck, but a very healthy 73. She had of her own accord lost some 65 pounds and wanted her “fat apron” lifted from her tummy. After her internist cleared her for surgery, we went ahead.

She recovered well and quickly after her surgery and was pleased with her outcome. This weight loss tummy tuck resulted in a loss of a few pounds. The patient had lost the majority of her weight beforehand. This is the way it usually works out. These operations are “cleanup” for the effects of large scale weight loss most often.

This woman does not look like a young woman after her surgery but looks much better than she did beforehand. That is the bottom line with cosmetic plastic surgery.

I met “S” in the emergency department of an Orange County hospital I no longer serve. She had been bitten on the lip by a large dog and incurred a fairly nasty wound. The dog bite repair here wound was a careful cleaning, trimming and closure by yours truly in the emergency department under local anesthesia. Unlike the majority of emergency patients with poor insurance coverage, this woman paid her bill slowly over about a year in payments.

She had a very nice outcome. It is too bad I can’t afford to do more of these, but they pay poorly even when insured and most patients are not as honorable as this one was. Good plastic surgery is not always cosmetic although cosmetic surgery pays most of our bills.

I take a lot of heat from other plastic surgeons for my “overly negative” posts, so here is a good liposuction result. There are good liposuction results. The vast majority of mine are good or better. Then again I am qualified and take the time to do a good job. You do not see lumps, bumps or dents here.

This young lady came in bothered by her “saddlebags.” She was happy 2 months later. There are more Before & After Liposuction images at my practice web site for those interested.

Here is a modest lip filler case before and five days later from my Orange County practice. Not every patient wants “Trout Pout meets domestic violence” on her lips. In this case we used Prevelle.

The exact filler choice is not as important (as long as a quality cosmetic material is used) in avoiding the trout pout as the quantity and technique. I recommend hyaluronic acid types in the lips to avoid unsightly lumps and bumps. Good technique limits the bruising.

Good liposuction results are nice smooth contours in the right client. Here is a young OC mom who wanted to get a few post-baby areas trimmed.

Good Liposuction Results

She works out several times a week and is not fat by any means, but had some small problem areas that would not get better with exercise. Her biggest problem area was her tummy bulge and part of that was fatty. Here she is in the image before and 6 weeks after tumescent tummy liposuction with a nice result. Remember liposuction just trims the fat, but doesn’t do much to the skin or muscle wall. This is a good liposuction result showing not lumps or surface irregularities.

Good tummy tuck results in an athlete can be difficult. The surgery needs to be carefully modified and proscribed specifically in very fit clients. Below is a “Before & After” of an athletic woman who could not lose the loose “pudge” in her tummy. The portion of this extra flab near the panty has been called mother’s apron. The medical term is pannus. This patient did not have a very loose or prominent pannus, but was bothered by it. Although she was quite fit, she came wondering whether an “athlete tummy tuck” might be beneficial.

Good Tummy Tuck Results

Good Athlete Tummy Tuck

Upon examination, a belly button hernia was also found with a lot of muscular wall thinning nearby. This was likely a derivative of child bearing. A tummy tuck with abdominal hernia repair was performed and at 5 months she was pleased.

Earlobe repair for tears (mostly from earrings) are pretty common. For the simple ones repair can be done in the office under local anesthesia (numbing shots.)

The picture above is a before and after earlobe repair from a case in our South Orange County office. The larger repairs from plugs and infection problems with tissue loss are more complicated. Health insurance usually doesn’t cover this type of work, but single-sided simple repairs are not terribly expensive.

“M” is a lady who had had a tummy tuck twenty years prior. After she visited another surgeon she had additional upper abdominal liposuction some years later. She never got the tightness she had wanted from that liposuction so later she considered revision of her tummy tuck. She did very well with her redo tummy tuck. Her pre-operative skin excess was greatly improved and the hollows created by the prior liposuction were also corrected in part. Not seen well in these images is the “puffy pubis” (commonly called a Ken Doll) she had following her original surgery. This was also nicely improved via her revision.

Here we have images of a woman I first saw a few years ago. She had had two breast implant operations before and noted after her second (an enlargement with full lift) that her left breast progressively dropped (over about a year). I recommended re-operation to re-set the lift and downsize her implants. She agreed to the lift but not the implant size decrease. Smaller implants do not weigh as much so the rate of recurrent sag should have been less. As these were silicone gel implants this is particularly important. They weigh more than saline-filled implants.

The After image was taken at 1 month. She moved Out of State, but I predict that the sag probably recurred at least to some extent.

The Lesson:

(1) Large implants are hard to keep up. Plan on smaller implants or more surgery later if you select larger implants. Large silicone implants also harden (capsular contracture) more frequently/severely than smaller implants or saline implants. This also contributes to a higher redo rate.